--On Friday, December 18, 2015 21:31 +0000 "Fred Baker (fred)" <fred@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Let me ask a question. I'm on the IAOC Meetings committee, > which is an advisory committee that does some research (with > AMS) and makes a recommendation to Ray, which he then takes to > the IAOC. The IAOC sometimes agrees with us and sometimes > doesn't. You will have just seen a note from Ray on this > mailer detailing the IAOC's objectives in meeting planning; > our committee, with strong involvement from AMS, does the > investigative legwork to try to achieve those. Fred, I'm in general agreement with Andrew and several other comments, but want to reinforce two of them. First, we seem to be seeing an increase in virtual interim meetings even in the last four or five years. I don't know whether that marks a change in the way the IETF does business and the people who are attending (although I suspect it does) nor do I know if there is any correlation between f2f plenary meetings that are far away or expensive for some key participants in some WGs and that increase or if it is due entirely to other factors. There are also considerable efforts to make remote participation (as distinct from remote lurking) more plausible. To the extent to which they succeed, it may have a side-effect of reducing the odds that someone who only participates in one or two WGs will travel to the IETF meeting site. Quite independent of factors we cannot predict [1], those factors suggest a very strong possibility of major changes in just a few years, much less than nine or more. Second, I've heard a great deal of unrest about claims of inability to make changes in meeting arrangements because those arrangements are already set three years out. Sometimes that even seems to take the form of "we can't do that for the next meeting, N+1, because it is within the three year window and we can't do it for meeting N+10 because it it too far away to think about". Creating that situation for 27 meetings into the future, with or without the sort of changes suggested by the above, seems to be a recipe for the sense of an unresponsive and unaccountable system that upsets the IETF community (whether there is a substantive problem or not). Part of that problem is a sense that the IAOC (and the meetings committee) have been less than forthcoming with the community about what is going on and what decisions are being made and why. Ray's note lists multiple criteria that we all know tend to conflict but does not identify priorities. That is reasonable in some ways, problematic in others, especially if one believes those decisions should be made by the community rather than a small cluster of people in secret. At the other ends of the process, BCP 101 appears to require that contracts (with no exclusion for hotel contracts) be posted, albeit with commercially-sensitive details redacted. My recollection is that we were promised for some years that would be done, but it hasn't been... and the hotel category doesn't even appear on the IAOC contracts page. It seems to me that your idea improves on that situation in some ways but also vastly increases the potential for a plausible perception of abuse (or at least a completely non-transparent process). So, while I think that stabilizing on a small number of locations would be a good idea, especially if we can get more favorable arrangements as a result, I think nine years is much too long... and that even three years may be too long unless it comes with a plan from the IAOC about how to make the whole system more obviously transparent and responsive. john [1] On the "unpredictable" scale, I'd hate to be the IAOC if there were another significant industry crash that brought about very significant pressures on travel budgets and a significant drop in attendance for several years if one had firm hotel contracts with large block commitments many years out.